• Home
  • About
    • About this Blog
    • About Andrew Taylor
    • Contact
  • Subscribe
  • Other AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal

The Artful Manager

Andrew Taylor on the business of arts & culture

The five actions of art-making

May 7, 2019 by Andrew Taylor

The recent book, A Restless Art: How participation won and why it matters, offers a beautiful balance between theory and practice, abstract and concrete. The author, François Matarasso, brings decades of reflection and action to this exploration of participatory or community art. And that combination brings deep value to so many conversations about art making, arts management, and arts in society.

Chapter two, for example, is a clear and compelling primer of the many ways we think about and talk about art in the world – as object, as typology, as act, as meaning. But a particularly lovely passage describes the opportunity of art-making for children, which Matarasso describes as an interplay of five actions:

  • Discover their own feelings and ideas, especially the obscure and incomprehensible aspects of their experience, and see how other beings encounter the world, through the stories, games, images and performances they explore;
  • Process their experience of being alive by playing with it artistically, pulling it apart and creatively rebuilding it at a manageable scale, unconsciously leaving traces of their imaginative pathway as messages for their future selves;
  • Understand what they like, believe, desire and care for through art that holds feelings and ideas, as well as moral, philosophical, even political positions against which they can work out who they—and others—are;
  • Organise the tide of childhood experience so that they come to terms with their own imagination and its relationship with reality, albeit at the cost of gradually taming a sense of wonder and awe at being alive; and
  • Share their evolving sense-making safely with others, testing their perceptions and positions, influencing the people around them and discovering more about themselves in the world.

Each of these separately and all of these together certainly resonate beyond childhood, as we all practice the challenging act of being human. Imagine where and how your organization, or your professional practice, supports or sparks these actions in those around you, or in yourself. Or how might it do so?

Well worth the reading. Short summary of the book here. Arlene Goldbard’s thoughtful overview here.


Filed Under: main

About Andrew Taylor

Andrew Taylor is a faculty member in American University's Arts Management Program in Washington, DC. [Read More …]

ArtsManaged Field Notes

#ArtsManaged logoAndrew Taylor also publishes a weekly email newsletter, ArtsManaged Field Notes, on Arts Management practice. The most recent notes are listed below.

RSS ArtsManaged Field Notes

  • Flip the script on your money narrative June 3, 2025
    Your income statement tells the tale of how (and why) money drives your business. Don't share the wrong story.
  • The sneaky surprise of new arts buildings May 27, 2025
    That shiny new arts facility is full of promise and potential, but also unexpected and unrelenting expense.
  • The one and the many of board service May 20, 2025
    How do nonprofit boards balance individual impulse with collective resolve?
  • The relentless rise of pseudo-productivity May 13, 2025
    Visible activity and physical exhaustion are not useful measures of valuable work.
  • The strategy screen May 6, 2025
    A strong strategy demands a clear job description

Artful Manager: The Book!

The Artful Manager BookFifty provocations, inquiries, and insights on the business of arts and culture, available in
paperback, Kindle, or Apple Books formats.

Recent Comments

  • Barry Hessenius on Business in service of beauty: “An enormous loss. Diane changed the discourse on culture – its aspirations, its modus operandi, its assumptions. A brilliant thought…” Jan 19, 18:58
  • Sunil Iyengar on Business in service of beauty: “Thank you, Andrew. The loss is immense. Back when Diane was teaching a course called “Approaching Beauty,” to business majors…” Jan 16, 18:36
  • Michael J Rushton on Business in service of beauty: “A wonderful person and a creative thinker, this is a terrible loss. – thank you for posting this.” Jan 16, 13:18
  • Andrew Taylor on Two goals to rule them all: “Absolutely, borrow and build to your heart’s content! The idea that cultural practice BOTH reduces and samples surprise is really…” Jun 2, 18:01
  • Heather Good on Two goals to rule them all: “To “actively sample novel experiences (in safe ways) to build more resilient perception and prediction” is about as useful a…” Jun 2, 15:05

Archives

Creative Commons License
The written content of this blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images are not covered under this license, but are linked (whenever possible) to their original author.

an ArtsJournal blog

Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in